Thursday, July 01, 2010

Dear Readers,we reached the half of 2010. A good point to talk about what I have read and liked so far. I wanted to read six books per month. That means 36 books at the end of June. In reality I read 26 and reviewed 10. That means there are still a bunch of reviews to be done. But I'm happy with most of the books read. And there have been some gems.

When you look around you see a lot of TOP FIVE lists. If you follow me since I started blogging last year you will know that I have difficulties to compile a ranking list. But that will change with this post. The list will be a bit different compared to others.

In case you don't know ediFanoB you should know that he shares his mind with four other personalities:Bona, Fide, Bona Fide and Kotm (= Keeper of the minutes). After a shambolic discussion we decided to go for a TOP SIX READ. Why six? Because we have one absolutely top read - in unison - and we thought it would be fair to add five more to our list.

When you look at our choice you will easily determine that towns - especially one town - play a major role.Now ediFanoB, Bona, Fide, Bona Fide and Kotm proudly present (drumroll):

Edi's Book Lighthouse

2010 Halftime

TOP SIX READ

Countdown .......

NUMBER SIX

Which would have been our number five without our unanimous top read. It is a debut fantasy novel and first part of a trilogy. We wrote in our review: "XXXX breathes magic with every syllable". It is the book with the most interesting and convincing magic system.

Around twenty years ago I spent a lot of time for reading books similar to our number five and settled in Medieval England. I still remember two series: I loved the twenty books in the Cadfael series by Ellis Peters and I loved a little bit more the ten books in the Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan series by Paul Harding (pen name of Paul Doherty).This year we discovered a new author, writing historical thrillers in the way we like. The second book in his The Chronicles of Harry Lytle series is our number five.

When I read about our number four for the first time - 1926, New York, Jazz, Flappers, Prohibition, The Roaring Twenties in combination with steampunk - we have been electrified! A new book from the author of one of our favorite series Newbury & Hobbes. You know which author we are talking about? No? It is George Mann and he is the author of our number four (this is the UK cover because we read the UK edition):Update: As you can read in the comment section Lou Anders asked if I could add the US cover of Ghosts of Manhattan. It is a pleasure to do it. So on the left UK and on the right US.

Again a second book in a series. It is fantasy, definitely one of the 2010 fantasy highlights. We liked it a lot. You may ask why it is only number three when it is one of the fantasy highlights. That depends on a slight change in my taste. Nevertheless I still love fantasy. Coming back to the book. Let me introduce our number three with the very first sentence of the book:"It entered the deep night, a spider reaching taller than a soldier."

Even we have unanimous top read the gap between number two and number one is not that big. It is a debut novel. It is set in London and there is steampunk. Michael Moorcock wrote: "The best debut novel I have read in ages." We agree mostly with him. It is a great, great, great read. We will explain in detail in our upcoming review (will be posted in July). There are two completely different covers for UK (right) and US (left). For this reason I present you both covers of our number two:

The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack

by Mark Hodder(review in progress)

NUMBER ONE

Unbelievable but true: Our number one is the first book we read in 2010! It is a real door stopper. We know there are people who found it boring and some even could not finish it!We wrote in our review:"It is a novel where you can bath your mind without getting drug addicted."I can tell you we bathed until edi's brain went pruney. This is our number one (so far):

I'm totally surprised. I didn't know that. I checked amazon (de, uk, com), book depository, snowbooks and finally I used google but I could not find any information about THE CLOCKWORK MAN OF TRAFALGAR SQUARE except a hint on your blog. And the book will be published in September 2010? Where can I order it in advance?